Brain drain and remittance revenue: cost, benefit, analysis
Unlike many of our best and brightest, emigration is a reality that won't be leaving Ghana any time soon. Three million Ghanaians, 15 percent of our population, live abroad, forming what some call the 11th region: the Diaspora. Most live in other West African nations; many live in wealthier countries like the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
The majority of emigrants, particularly to developed countries, are well educated and highly skilled. The costs of the brain drain are severe and the revenues of remittances are substantial. A quick cost benefit analysis is offered here:
The Cost
Many countries that provide labour for rich nations have expressed concern that their citizens are being denied basic human rights overseas, where they tend to be discriminated against and work in positions beneath their level of training for salaries that don"t cover high costs of living.
In a recent study more than 86 percent of Ghanaians working in the Diaspora found the conditions in their new home no better than here. More than 55 percent had problems integrating and felt alienated by their new society. Almost half of the respondents had feelings of regret because they were helping the development of other countries and not their own.
Back at home, we have lost our most highly skilled professionals, whom we have trained at great expense. Healthcare demonstrates the most obvious loss of professionals, with sixty percent of Ghanaian doctors now practicing overseas. More than half our nurses have left the country in the past five years and the rate of departure in this field is rapidly increasing, according to a recent paper by Frank Nyonator and Delanyo Dovlo.
Ghanaian medial professionals leave for better salaries, access to state-of-the-art equipment, and more efficient systems where they know they will be paid on time. As a result, Ghana is way off WHO targets for the minimum number of physicians and nurses per population and the rate of vacant positions in this field has more than doubled since 2001.
The 2002 Service Provision Assessment Survey indicated that full services of maternal, child and reproductive health are available at only 28 percent of facilities in the country. Only 69 percent offer basic immunisation, and a mere 13 percent of facilities had the capacity to provide quality 24-hour emergency services.
The 2003 Health Sector Annual Review recorded increases in infant and under five mortality and malnutrition rates. Supervised deliveries, malaria control, and the fight against HIV/AIDS have all performed below expectations and the prevalence of Guinea Worm has worsened.
Nyonator and Dovlo feel that Ghana is unlikely to meet its Millennium Development Goal of reducing child mortality by two-thirds by 2015. They further contend that at this rate of drainage, the medical system is on the verge of total collapse.
All this regression has happened in the face of increased healthcare spending by Government of more than 30 percent in the past few years, and with Ghanaian schools turning out a high yield of trained doctors, nurses, and pharmacists; yet the workforce in this sector is in decline.
The loss of human resources for other sectors of society and the economy is also significant. Remittances, which are often cited as a reason to embrace emigration to richer nations, may in fact have negative impacts on Ghana’s development, says Takyiwaa Manuh, Director of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana. Migrants can invest in unproductive sectors, they can cause inflation by creating demand without increasing production capacity, they can increase demand for imports and create a negative effect on balance of payments, and they can intensify social inequalities because the people who emigrate from Ghana tend to be from well off families to begin with. Remittances tend to benefit specific families and clans rather than the country as a whole.
The Benefit
One cannot deny that remittances are an important source of revenue for Ghana, comprising our third largest source of foreign income, outstripping foreign direct investment. Remittances also offer more flexibility and are more consistent than foreign aid. If remittances that do not come through formal financial channels are included, money from emigrants may be our largest single source of income.
While remittances have been criticised for supporting only the funeral, construction, and agricultural industries, such expenditures can create growth and new jobs. And Ex-pats also make generous donations of cash and equipment to community infrastructure, hospitals, schools, and disaster relief programmes through ethnic associations and their alma maters.
Remittance payments are often used to finance start-up businesses, which in turn create new jobs. Non-resident Ghanaians are also known to spark demand for non-traditional exports, particularly Ghanaian food and clothing.
Non-monetarily, Ghanaians abroad tend to export Ghanaian culture and replicate it in their new homes, and create communities complete with Chiefs and Queen Mothers. Through these overseas networks they are ambassadors of Ghanaian culture.
The Analysis
Despite the benefits of the "11th Region of Ghana,” the most powerful impact that our emigrants make usually happens upon their return. Ghanaians who return home generally stress political and social reasons for their return; improved political stability and macroeconomic performance are great motivators.
At the same time, many others remain in developed nations far longer than they anticipated, waiting for further improvements in Ghana or more income abroad to make a return viable. In the end, for those who return, a major pull factor is family ties, which have been better maintained in the age of the 'information highway.’
On their return, Ghanaians tend to invest time, money and skills in the formal and informal sectors creating a “brain gain.” The businesses that they start tend to be in retail and services sectors, both of which create jobs. The majority of the migrants who return do so with upgraded education and skills to offer, acquired in wealthy northern countries.
It is these gains that prompted the formation of the Non-Resident Ghanaian Secretariat to ensure that ex-patriots stay connected and facilitate their investment in Ghana’s development. The Secretariat was charged with establishing institutional structures to enhance dialogue, provide advice and assistance on migration matters, and improve the available information about Non-Resident Ghanaians.
A few years after its establishment, NRGS was moved from the office of the National Economic Dialogue to that of the GIPC, which is chronically under-resourced. The Secretariat is without staff and budget.
The failure to turn the NRGS into an active body is a missed opportunity to move beyond complaining about or even regulating migration and into a realm of multilateral action designed to make the most of migration for both source and destination countries. This means filling certain holes, most notably in healthcare, and creating an organised system to maximise the input of NRGs so that they can help develop other brains as well as infrastructure, industry, and social programmes. Further, such a system should keep them connected with Ghana to improve the likelihood that they will one day bring their brains home.
Nyonator and Dovlo make several recommendations for retaining our life-saving talent. They recommend developing medium skilled health practitioners to do the work of doctors and nurses, investment into training facilities for health professionals through the Districts, compensation that is tied to performance but allows for greater remuneration, recruiting talent from India and the Philippines as a temporary measure, allowing health professionals to have limited private practice to supplement income, educational benefits for the children of health professionals, the bonding of medical graduates, and investment into increasing the efficiency of payment systems for public health professionals.
